Things were much better in the City, her father told her; but upon two or three occasions when she had ventured to hint her anxiety respecting the early repayment of Francis Tredethlyn’s money, the merchant’s answers had filled her mind with vague disquietude. There was an indifference in Mr. Hillary’s manner that alarmed Maude’s keen sense of right and honour. “Tredethlyn is too well off to want his money in any desperate hurry, my dear,” he said; “he is not likely to become a very pressing creditor.” The hedgerows about Isleworth and Twickenham were green, with their earliest buds before Francis Tredethlyn came again to the Cedars. Mr. Hillary had called upon the young man at his hotel several times before he succeeded in seeing him, and had only with great difficulty wrung from him an admission of the fact that he was the anonymous lender of the twenty thousand pounds that had saved the merchant from ruin and disgrace. “My dear Tredethlyn, why should you insist upon any disguise?” Mr. Hillary said, with a pleasant ease that not every man could have maintained in such a position as that in which the merchant found himself with regard to this simple-minded, country-bred Crœsus. “Is it not enough to have been the most generous of men, without trying to carry generosity to the verge of Quixotism? How can I doubt the identity of my preserver? I know that Maude betrayed my necessities to you, under the excitement of those unfortunate theatricals, and I know that loans of twenty thousand pounds do _not_ drop from the skies. My dear fellow, I am most heartily thankful to you for what you have done. It was a very noble thing to do, an action that any man might be proud of doing. If I had ever doubted your having good blood in your veins, your conduct in this one matter would have settled my doubts. But I never did doubt it, my dear Tredethlyn. I have recognized you from the first as a gentleman; not by the right of an accidental thirty thousand a year, scraped out of all manner of commercial gutters by a miserly uncle; but by virtue of some of the best blood in the West of England.” And then Mr. Hillary stretched out both his hands, and shook those of Francis Tredethlyn in his vigorous grasp; and altogether the interview could scarcely have been more entirely satisfactory had the merchant written a cheque for the twenty thousand pounds on the spot. Indeed, to Francis any immediate repayment of that money would have been a grievous mortification. Was it not delightful to him to remember that he had been of service to _her_ father? Was not the money advanced to the merchant a kind of link between Maude and the man who loved her so dearly and so hopelessly,--only a very sordid, earthy link; but better than none?